District Education Manager faults Mzimba South teachers for negligence

District Education Manager for Mzimba South, Fanwell Chiwowa, has blamed teachers in the district for spending weeks in towns accessing salaries while the learners in their schools are left in the cold.

64 female teachers ready to work in the rurar areas. Picture By Leonard Masauli

The District Education Manager was speaking on Friday, during graduation ceremony for 64 Female Teachers at DAPP Teachers Training College in Mzimba, saying such negligence is compromising quality of education in the district.

He said “It has been noted as a tendency, when teachers have gone to access their salaries in towns and at the Boma, they spend weeks leaving their classes with no one. This tendency is affecting the quality of education in the district.

“It is worrisome to note that Mzimba South has performed badly in the previous Primary School Leaving Certificate in Malawi, and we are on number 33 out of 34 educational districts with 62.5 percent. And among other factors is the negligence of teachers in schools.

He said mobile markets in the district is also affecting the learners because teachers abandon their classes to visit the markets for the whole day.

Chiwowa further urged the graduating teachers to be exemplary in their work and be ready to work in the rural communities where life is not all that simple.

Senior Inspector of schools and Colleges in the Ministry of Education Science and Technology, Jane Mhone said the government appreciate the effort by private Teachers colleges to train more female teachers to uplift education standards in as far as shortage of female teachers are concerned.

Mhone said she believes that the graduating students will help to reduce the teacher to pupil ratio in the communities, which has risen from 1 to 60, to 1:200.

“We appreciate the effort by DAPP TTC to train more female teachers. However, we have had challenges to allocate teachers to working areas because a number of them have resigned, following unfavorable and hostile conditions in the rural areas.

DAPP College Operations Manager, Dominic Nali said the teachers are well trained with a number of skills, such as leadership, community service promotion and character formation which will help them to be another kind of teacher in their respective schools.

Nali further asked the graduating teachers to maintain the spirit of team work, to be able to transform learners into responsible being in the future.